Spitting Into the Polluted Wind

What’s missing from Andrew Jacobs’s article in the New York Times on the continuing increase in pollution in China despite the authorities’ efforts:

Ma Jun, director of the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs in Beijing, said many of the government’s efforts to curtail pollution had been offset by the number of construction projects that spit dust into the air and the surge in private car ownership.

In Beijing, driving restrictions that removed a fifth of private cars from roads each weekday have been offset by 250,000 new cars that hit the city streets in the first four months of 2010.

Many of the most polluting industries were forced to relocate far from the capital before the 2008 Summer Olympics, but the wind often carries their emissions hundreds of miles back.

“We’re at a stage of unprecedented industrialization, but there have to be better ways to handle the problem,” said Mr. Ma, whose organization has a registry of environmental scofflaws. “Sometimes it’s painful to look at the data.”

is that China continues to subsidize gasoline, coal mining, concrete production (the largest source of carbon release into the atmosphere after transport and energy production),and automobile manufacturing and lacks the civil, social, and legal infrastructure to do anything serious about the pollution situation.

In the face of these enormous obstacles, the Chinese authorities’ efforts to reduce China’s unimaginably serious pollution problem are like spitting into the polluted wind.